His 2009 novel Ice was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. His script for 1996 movie Cosi, which revolves around a group of mentally ill patients who put on a play, won the Australian Film Institute Award that year for Best Adapted Screenplay. Nowra's work as a scriptwriter also includes a credit on the comedy The Matchmaker and the Vincent Ward romance Map of the Human Heart, which was invited to the Cannes Film Festival.

His radio plays include Albert Names Edward, The Song Room, The Widows and the five part The Divine Hammer, which aired on the ABC in 2003.[2]

He has written two memoirs, The Twelfth of Never (1999) and Shooting the Moon (2004). In March 2007, Nowra published a controversial book on violence in Aboriginal communities, Bad Dreaming. He was also one of the principal writers for the multi award-winning 2008 SBS TV series, First Australians.

Nowra is also a cultural commentator, with essays and commentary appearing regularly in The Monthly and the Australian Literary Review as well as major newspapers. He has been married three times, and has also had homosexual periods.

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Nowra was born Mark Doyle[3] in Melbourne, to the second of his mother's three husbands. His birthdays were never celebrated with parties when he was growing up, and he could never quite understand why. His mother told him as a boy that he would hear stories about her having killed a man, but he was not to believe any version but her own, which she would not reveal until his 21st birthday. His sister later told him that their mother had killed her own father, their grandfather. On his 21st birthday, 12 December 1971, his mother confirmed this, and revealed that it had occurred on 12 December 1945, exactly five years before he was born, which was why there were no celebrations of his own birthday. His mother was charged with murder but acquitted on the ground of extreme provocation after years of alcohol-fuelled violence. She in turn was abusive towards her own son, often telling him he was stupid and worthless, making him walk down the street in his sister's dresses as a punishment, and telling him he was "behind the door when looks were given out".[4] His father was also abusive when he was around, but he was an interstate truck driver who was not often home. His mother has seen, heard or read none of his work. He has had almost no contact with her since he left Melbourne. He has had no contact with his father at all in that time.[5] He developed an early love of theatre through his uncle Bob Herbert (or Bob Herbert-Hay), a stage manager for J. C. Williamson's productions.[3]

In his early teens he realised he was bisexual. In early adulthood he had a series of same-sex encounters, and at one time was in a committed relationship with a drag queen named Alan.

In the early 1970s he walked out of his Australian literature studies at Melbourne's La Trobe University. The subject of a tutorial was Patrick White's novel The Tree of Man. Nowra stood up, said he thought it was dreadful, walked out and never returned to finish his degree.[6]

He later had a difficult personal relationship with Patrick White. White championed Nowra's early work (Visions, Inside the Island), even taking out a paid advertisement in The Sydney Morning Herald when they refused to publish his letter admonishing the theatre critic H. G. Kippax, who had been negative about the plays. But Nowra never liked White's work.[6] White could also be very negative about Nowra. He attended the premiere of Nowra's translation of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, but left the auditorium before the start because he thought, sight unseen, it would be uninteresting. His partner Manoly Lascaris refused to leave, so White sat out the performance in the foyer.

Nowra had a similarly challenging relationship with the actress Judy Davis, who appeared in some of his plays. Nowra considered both White and Davis had personalities that combined self-loathing, narcissism, ruthlessness and haughty egos.[6][7]

His first plays were written at La Mama Theatre in Melbourne in 1973.[3] Soon after abandoning his university degree, one day he got into his car and decided to drive north, as far away from his parents as possible, but without any clear idea of his destination. He reached the NSW coastal town of Nowra, when his car broke down. He had already decided to abandon his birth name, and chose Nowra because of this enforced stop.[4] He worked in several jobs and lived an itinerant lifestyle until the mid-1970s, when his plays began to attract attention. He has lived in Sydney since this time, mainly in Kings Cross.

In late 1974 he married the composer Sarah de Jong;[8] they co-wrote some of the music for his stage works.[3] In 1976 they lived in Munich, Germany for six months.[8] They divorced ten years later, after he had an affair with her best female friend. He also used de Jong's father's suicide when she was 7 years old, as material for his 1982 play Spellbound, in which the main character is in an unhappy marriage and drowns herself in the same river as de Jong's father did. He did not advise her he was using this story, and when she found out, she felt unable to forgive him.[4] During his marriage to de Jong, he was resident playwright of the Sydney Theatre Company in 1979–1980, and Associate Director at Adelaide's Lighthouse Theatre in 1982–1983.[3]

He returned to a gay lifestyle for some time, before marrying his second wife, television presenter Gerri Williams, at the Soho Bar in Kings Cross, in early 1997. It was attended by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.[4] He married his third and current wife, the author Mandy Sayer, in 2003. They had worked together when they co-edited the anthology In the Gutter ... Looking at the Stars in 2000. They have separate homes not far from each other, in which their daytime writing activities are conducted, and they come together in the evening.[9][10] In February 2014 they were named joint holders of the 2014 Copyright Agency Non-Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Technology, Sydney.[11]

Nowra's plays are studied in Veronica Kelly's work The Theatre of Louis Nowra.